Page 13 - Blog 2015 - Korea in Canada

KoREa In Canada
KoREa-Canada Blog 2015

written with adapted Chinese characters called “Hanja(한자)”. However, Koreans now almost
exclusively use the Hangul alphabet. You can easily live in Korea without knowing a single
Chinese character, although it’s always helpful to know a few (or many), especially if you
wish to learn Korean up to an advanced level. For example, in many news headlines Chinese
characters are still used for brevity’s sake, and characters are also often used in between
parenthesis to help clarify the meaning of a word that has many different meanings.

Hangul is composed of fourteen consonants and ten vowels, in addition to having double
consonants and “clustered” consonants. Because of this, Hangul is in fact really easy to learn.
You should noT learn Korean by reading the romanized script. It’s a bad habit and simply
not a smart thing to do. If you put one or two hours learning Hangul for the next couple of
days, I guarantee you that you’ll be able to read by the end of the week. Even if you’re
planning a short trip to Korea no longer than a week or two, I would still highly encourage
you to learn the script.

Find a BUnCH oF aWeSoMe TooLS onLine

These days it’s amazing the amount of great language learning tools and resources that
you can find online. one of the first things you’ll need along with your textbook and newly-
equipped Hangul reading skills, is a good online dictionary. Here are three very good ones:
• naver
• daum
• 한국어기초사전 (Korean dictionary for Beginners)

Here’s a bunch of awesome websites and podcasts:
• Talk To Me in Korean
• Korean Champ
• KBS World
• lingholic

Here are news websites that are available both in Korean and English (and/or other
languages):
• Korea Times (this resource is great because it often contains the English and translated
Korean version of the article)
• Korea Joongang daily (look for the “bilingual column” on the right)
• Yonhap news (available in multiple languages)
• TEd Talks5 (read the transcripts of TEd Talks in English first, and then try your hand

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